Warp wrote:
>   I'm not sure I have any reason to, but what I fear is that once the
> developement of POV-Ray becomes completely open, if it so happens that
> nobody takes the role of strong leader ("dictator") or nobody is accepted
> as such, what will happen is that there will be too many cooks spoiling
> the broth and no general agreement is ever reached over which kind of
> scripting language should be adopted and implemented. Even if an attempt

Well, it is my hope that whatever is released as 'official' by povray.org
will be accepted as official.

I do accept (and it has been my concern for many years, hence e.g. the
requirements for '.unofficial' in non-standard SDL's) that without a
standard for the language, it will diverge into various incompatible
derivatives. Hence, I may well want to take the stance that anything that
uses the 'POV-Ray' name has to comply with certain requirements regarding
the language. Not sure exactly what these would be, it's something we can
work out later.

>   3) I would say the most likely scenario: Someone will embed an existing
> scripting language (such as LUA) as an *alternative* to the existing SDL.

I have had a look at a few embeddable languages, such as AngelCode (see
http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/) but haven't come to any solid
conclusion yet.

I will comment however that it's probable that we would want to take an
existing library and modify it (if necessary) to suit, rather than writing
something entirely new. I would expect that whatever language we use, it
would require some modification, since expressing POV vectors and so forth
would become too cumbersome otherwise.

>   The main reason for the need for a new scripting language is that the
> current SDL is very limited (and slow). There are things which are simply
> impossible to do. Thus making a prototype of a more flexible and powerful
> language which is then simply converted into existing SDL would not be
> possible.

I think it's important that any new SDL be at least P-coded, if not fully
JIT'd on platforms that support it. The latter would be handy in particular
for user-defined shaders. And also note that as a GPL'd program, we can use
portions of the GCC suite as needed.

-- Chris

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